July 2021 More letters from Leonid Kinskey to Dimitri and Olivia Tiomkin

Leonid Kinskey, best known for portraying the character Sascha the bartender in the film Casablanca, sent three letters to Dimitri (“Dimochka”) and Olivia Tiomkin in March and April 1977. Similar to the letters previously profiled from 1978, these letters are filled with news from Hollywood.

[Scroll to the bottom of this post to see the letters in their entirety.]

In a letter dated March 11, 1977, Kinskey notes that at a pre-inauguration gala for American President-elect Jimmy Carter, actor John Wayne’s entrance and exit at the Kennedy Center performance is accompanied by Dimitri Tiomkin’s music from The High and the Mighty.

High and the Mighty sheet music

The audience rose in a standing ovation. “As a matter of fact even Jimmy Carter stood up, the tune ‘I was high and mighty’ heard as the background music, created a feeling of a National Anthem. It was a very touching scene!”

Kinskey bemoans the retirement of his friend Jack Cutting, Disney’s manager of Foreign Relations who oversaw translating and dubbing for the studio’s international product, replaced by Blake Todd.

George and Gloria Korngold, recently married, welcome Kinskey and film music writer Tony Thomas to their home in Toluca Lake, California, formerly the residence of George’s father, composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Kinskey describes the “old Spanish house” with mementoes related to Erich Wolfgang “hidden out of the way.”

LOST HORIZON Vocalion SACD

The Tiomkins were also in touch with record producer George Korngold. George had just seen Leonid before writing a letter to the Tiomkins on October 25, 1976, while living temporarily in an apartment located roughly between Universal and Warner Bros. studios. He announces that he will marry Gloria after remaining single for the past 17 years and they will move into the house in neighboring Toluca Lake. The RCA disc recording and stereo-8 cartridge for Tiomkin’s music score for Lost Horizon, produced by Korngold featuring the National Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Charles Gerhardt, has just been released. He hopes Dimitri is happy with it, “it is a beautiful and dignified album and deserves all the attention it can possibly get.”

Kinskey’s letter continues with the latest news on writer-director Boris Ingster, his wife Christianne, and their son Michael, including the travails of living in Beverly Hills during inflation. Ingster is forced to sell artworks to pay property taxes.

Two weeks later, Kinskey writes of the country-wide hunger for nostalgic books on Hollywood and notes that Dimitri’s Academy Award acceptance speech is frequently repeated.

60th anniversary of Tiomkin’s famous Academy Awards acceptance speech, March 30, 2015

And, finally, a letter dated April 10, encourages Dimitri to write a book, “Looking Back,” at the “Golden Age of Hollywood.”

Years earlier, during that Golden Age, when Ukrainian-born actress Anna Sten and her producer-director-writer husband Eugene Franke threw a house-warming party at their new home in Santa Monica in 1937, both Kinskey and Tiomkin provided entertainment. Kinskey danced with Sten and Tiomkin played piano selections of his own compositions, most likely from Lost Horizon. The guest list included Rouben Mamoulian, Akim Tamiroff, and Joseph von Sternberg.

A few years later, in 1943, when The Girl from Leningrad was in pre-production at United Artists, five of those party-goers—Franke, Sten, Tamiroff, Kinskey, and Tiomkin—were announced as participants although by the time the film was released as Three Russian Girls in 1944 only Sten and Franke were involved.

In a 1992 interview published in 1999, when asked if he knew Dimitri Tiomkin well, Kinskey replied, “We were very, very good friends with Tiomkin right from the beginning, and I am still friendly with his young wife, his second wife. She remarried, and we still exchange letters, and telephone calls from London. I see her every time she comes in. He is a very charming man, her husband. Writes wonderful letters. Dmitri [sic] Tiomkin was a remarkable guy, really. Very warm.”